Friday, July 26, 2013

There are a number of audio tapes of forensic value (1) in
high profile crimes, including KentState,
the RFK assassination, the assassination of President Kennedy and more recently
in the Martin/Zimmerman case in Florida.

While the controversial Dallas Police tape that some
acoustical experts say contains evidence of a fourth shot from the Grassy
Knoll, has received the most attention, the recordings of Air Force One radio
transmissions from 11/22/63
should be of more general interest because of the variety of issues and subjects.

The Air Force One radio transmission tapes from 11/22/63
include the LBJ Library cassette recordings released in the late 1970s (2) and
the more recently discovered reel to reel tapes found among the personal
effects of Gen. Chester Clifton, the president’s military aide. (3)

COMBINED TRANSCRIPT AND TAPE

Dissatisfied with the official transcript of the LBJ Library
version, I compiled my own transcript, and when the Clifton
tape was released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA),
I compiled a transcript of that as well, and then compared the two. (4)

The Clifton tape
is longer by about a half hour, but both tapes contain unique information, so I
combined and annotated the transcript that I am still working on.

Acoustical forensic specialist Ed
Primeau studied the tapes and is creating a combined copy, using the better
quality of the two where they overlap, so the two tapes will soon be combined,
with the result being one seamless, high quality tape of all the available
information that will be used to conduct a complete forensic analysis. (5)

This will include a scientific, technical analysis that will
try to determine how many edits there are, how many frequencies were used, what
frequencies they were, and see if static and noise can be eliminated,
background conversations enhanced, and try to answer other similar questions. (6)

This forensic analysis will also include a review of the
content and conversations on the existing recordings – identify those who talk
or are mentioned, translate all codes and technical language, explain and paraphrase
what is said and compare it to what we know from other sources. (7)

Since the Clifton tape is longer than the officially
released LBJ version, it includes conversations that were edited out of the
publicly released version, which also permits us to determine why key comments
were deleted from the public version and others not.

Some people mentioned on the newly released Clifton
version, including Maj. Patterson, aka “Stranger,” in charge of the White House
Situation Room at the time of the assassination, who is heard talking on the
tapes. He has been recently located and interviewed for the first time about
what happened that day. (8)

Gen. LeMay’s aide, Col. Dorman, is also heard on the newly
released tape in a section edited out of the publicly released version, with an
urgent message for Gen. LeMay, who was flying back to Washington from Canada.
Col. Dorman’s wife, who was working at the White House that day, has also been
located and recalls what happened that day. (9)

There are also conversations of interest among White House
aides and the military officers on such subjects as the autopsy, the living
arrangements of the new President and plans for the funeral, as well as
conversations between LBJ and the JFK’s mother and Mrs. Connally at Parkland
hospital. Most interesting are the conversations between Air Force One and the
Situation Room at the White House.

The entire combined tape is over eighty minutes in length.

PREQUEL TO THE AIR FORCE ONE RADIO TRANSMISSIONS

The Air Force One radio communication tapes “best recaptures
the sound of the hours as it waited for leadership,” is the way T. H. White put
it, even though he never got a chance to actually hear the tapes. (10)

A study of the assassination of President Kennedy through the
sounds of the radio broadcast transmissions provides a unique perspective into
these historic and tragic events, but it is not the complete picture of what
happened that day.

Before listening to the tape as part of a forensic
analysis, even though we are interested in different aspects of the tapes,
those seriously interested in this subject should all get on the same page and
become familiar with what’s already been done even before the tapes were made
public.

AF1 - 101

“That
Friday Lyndon Johnson did not know that John Kennedy had ordered the
taping of all Angel (Air Force One) conversations while the plane was in flight,”
wrote William Manchester (in The Death of
a President). It was an order by the President that was carried out with
diligence, and apparently included the tape recording of all Special Air
Mission (SAM) flights because the Air Force
One tapes include communications between the Cabinet plane and the White House
and refers to General LeMay’s SAM flight
from Canada,
neither of which directly involved Air Force One.

“Patches” are sequences of conversations over the radio,
each patch having a beginning and end, but they often concern a variety of
different subjects. It is advisable before listening to the tapes to become
familiar with some of the terminology of radio communications, the code words
used and what they mean, which I’ve compiled and posted on line. (11)

William Manchester was one of the first to broach this
subject in his book “The Death of a
President” (12)

“Tourists thought of the
President’s home as stationary, at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue. They were wrong. The White House was
capable of multiple division. It could be in several cities simultaneously. The
(telephone switchboard) girls on the fourth floor of the ExecutiveOfficeBuilding
remained on duty, but the real White House was wherever Lancer happened to be,
and once he hit the road the key switchboard was a jungle of color-coded wires
in the executive mansion’s east basement, manned by elite Signal Corps
technicians of the White House Communications Agency. It was a national
security precaution that Lancer always be within five minutes of a telephone.”

“In the autumn of 1963 the White House telephone number was still NA-tional
8-1414, that winter the digits took over and it was changed to 456-1414, and
when the man of the house was home communications were relatively simple.
Of course, the President himself didn’t answer the phone. A light would flash
on a forty-bulb switchboard on the fourth floor of the Executive Office
Building and if you knew a name of a Presidential aide one of the women
operators would instantly connect you with the proper extension, from which you
could be transferred to the oval office, or the mansion.”

“But the moment the Chief Executive
left his helipad all that changed. Elaborate security precautions went into
effect.”

“Even names were changed. Codes replaced them, from time to time names and
groupings were changed…The White House was no longer the White House. It was
Castle (aka Crown), and during a trip the President’s precise location at any
given moment was Charcoal. He, himself was no longer John Kennedy, he was
Lancer, who was married to Lace, whose children were a daughter named Lyric and
a son named Lark. The First Family was all in the L’s — though Lyric’s and
Lark’s grandmother lived in a Georgetown
house which was referred to as Hamlet. Secret Service men were in the D’s.
Chief James J. Rowley was Domino, Digest, Dazzle, Deacon, Debut, and Tom Wells
of the kiddie detail were Drummer, Dresser and Dasher. W’s were for staff; Ken
O’Donnell, Lancer’s chief vassal was Wand. Evelyn Lincoln, was Willow,
Pierre Salinger, Wayside. Mac Kilduff who was to do Wayside’s press
chores on the Texas trip— and, who ironically, had been told to start looking
for another job, because Wand had decided that he was expendable — had
been christened Warrior. General’s Clifton
and McHugh were Watchman and Wing. Taz Shepard, who would be minding the
store at Castle during the Texas trip, was Witness. V’s were reserved for
the Vice-President and his family. Lyndon Johnson was Volunteer, Lady Bird, who
had never had much luck with names became Victoria…”

SAMANDLIBERTY STATION (COLLINS RADIO)

“There is a tape
recording in the archives of the Government” wrote Theodore H. White in his
book The Making of a President, 1964
“which best recaptures the sound of the hours as it waited for leadership. It
is a recording of all the conversations in the air, monitored by the [Army] Signal
Corps Midwestern center ‘Liberty,’
between Air Force One in Dallas,
the Cabinet plane over the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs' CommunicationCenter in Washington.”

White never got the opportunity to hear this tape recoding,
but once, while visiting the White House, he was permitted to read a transcript
that he wasn’t permitted to keep, but he understood its significance. He also
knew about “Liberty,” the special
radio relay station that set the frequencies, established the network and
monitored the communications used by the planes that ferried the top leadership
in the administration and the military.

The Strategic Air Mission - SAM
detachment - the 89th Military Air Wing of the United States Air Force is based
at Andrews Air Force Base, just outside of Washington in Maryland, and is
responsible for shuttling the President and his cabinet where ever they need to
go. (13)

For its radio communications SAM
utilized four primary frequencies that were set by ‘Liberty’
station, which was physically located at the headquarters of the company that
manufactured the communications equipment - the Collins Radio company in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa.

From Collins Radio Annual Reports: “Air Force One, the Presidential airplane, was
placed in service in 1962 using communications equipment developed and
manufactured by Collins. The aircraft…was modified to meet special
requirements…In 1962, the station that many remember as ‘Liberty’ was opened
and operated from the new communications building…(in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa)….Collins had a contact with the Air Force to serve as either the primary
communications station or as a backup whenever Air Force One, the presidential
aircraft, and other aircraft it the VIP
fleet carried cabinet members or high ranking military officers. Over the
airwaves the station’s call word was ‘Liberty.’” (14)

The Secret Service and WHCA also maintained the “Charlie”
channel for those units involved in the motorcade in Dallas,
while the Dallas Police Department (DPD) utilized two other channels, one
strictly for the motorcade. The Dallas Sheriff’s Department also had its own
frequency used by its personnel. So there were a number of different radio
frequency channels being used by security officials at the time of the
assassination, and all of them were routinely recorded by the WHCA. (15)

“Air Force One’s
communications center was in constant radio contact with the motorcade and with
the White House Communications Agency’s temporary signal board in the
Sheraton-Dallas Hotel,” Col. Ralph Albertazzle wrote in The Flying White House – The Story of Air Force One. “From there,
trunk lines linked the traveling White House with the real one in Washington,
the MilitaryCommandCenter at the Pentagon, the State
Department and Secret Service Headquarters.” (16)

WHCA COL. GEORGE MCNALLY
- STAR GROUP

The man responsible for keeping the President within five
minutes of a secure phone line, as explained by Manchester,
was Col. George McNally.

“Colonel George
McNally, alias Star — this was the S group — saw to it that he was much closer
than that (five minutes). There were phones in the President’s helicopter,
phones aboard Aircraft 26000, portable phones spotted fifty feet away from
every airfield space where 26000 could park, and radiophones in his motorcade
cars, operating on two frequencies. Like the Secret Service and the Democratic
National Committee, Colonel McNally had a corps of advance men. By dawn of that
Thursday morning temporary switchboards had been installed in trailers and
hotel rooms in San Antonio, Houston,
Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin
and at the LBJ Ranch. Each had its own unlisted phone number.”

“The Dallas White House, for example, was in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel. It
could be reached through RIverside 1-3421, RIverside
1-3422, and RIverside 1-3423, though anyone who dialed one of them and lacked a
code name of his own would find the conversation awkward.”

Manchester: “S’s advance man for the Texas trip was Warrant
Officer Art Bales (code name Sturdy) a gaunt thirty-year veteran who knew
every executive in the Southwest Bell Telephone Company could bug any line from
the nearest manhole or conduit and had the facilities to scramble almost any
conversation, or to disconnect it without notice. When out of town the
President needed one clear circuit to Washington
at all times, which meant that Bales had to pull the plug on a Cabinet member,
if necessary.”

“In motorcades Bales would ride in the
Signals control car. By tradition this was the last vehicle in the caravan, and
his companion there, and his roommate at hotel stops, was a swarthy S man,
Warrant Officer Ira D. Gearhart. Gearhart (Shadow), had been assigned the most
sinister task in the Presidential party. No one called him by his Christian
name, his surname, or even by his code name. He was the “man with the satchel,”
or, more starkly, “the bagman”. The bag (also known as “the black bag” and “the
football”) was a thirty-pound metal [‘Haliburton’] suitcase with an intricate
combination lock. Within were various Strangelove packets, each bearing wax
seals and the signatures of the Joint Chiefs. Inside one were cryptic numbers
which would permit the President to set up a crude hot line to the Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom
and the President of France on four minutes’ notice. A second provided the
codes that would launch a nuclear attack.”

CHARLIE CHANNEL - MISSING

The motorcade security had their own radio channel – “Charlie”
channel, which was set up by the WHCA and included the Secret Service, with an
operational base set up in a suite of rooms at the Dallas Sheraton Hotel.

After the motorcade left Love Field, “Charlie” channel was
monitored by the pilot of Air Force One, Col. Swindel, who decided not to join
the other crew members for lunch in the Love Field terminal and he remained in
the cockpit.

Swindel was sitting back relaxing, as the radio crackled
dispatches from those in the motorcade, when all of a sudden there was
shouting, he recognized Secret Service agent Kellerman’s voice, “we’re hit!”
and “cover Volunteer!”, which he knew was Vice President Johnson, and he knew
immediately that something was wrong.

It is apparent, from the information contained in Gerald
Blaine’s The Kennedy Detail, that as
soon as bullets started flying, Secret Service Kellerman, in the front
passenger seat of the target car, was on the radio, tuned to “Charlie Channel”
saying, “Lawson, this is Kellerman. We’re hit. Get us to the nearest hospital!
Quick!” when at the same time the second shot was fired and then the third, the
fatal head shot occurred - while
Kellerman was on the radio talking. (18)

“As he was relaying the message, he heard one bang, and then
another, and as Greer trampled down on the accelerator, Kellerman felt the car
burst forward with such thrust he felt like it was jumping off the goddamned
road. Up ahead the lead car was nearing the overpass when the first shot was
fired. Through the open windows of the sedan, Agent Win Lawson heard the sharp
report and turned to look back through the rear window. He could see some
commotion in the president’s car behind him. Then Kellerman’s voice over the radio,
‘We’re hit!’”

If this is the case, then the sounds of the second and
third, fatal head shot should have been broadcast over the open microphone on
Charlie Channel, along with Kellerman’s orders, and if it was broadcast, it should
have been tape recorded, if anyone was recording these proceedings, as the WHCA
base at the Dallas Sheraton should have been doing. ‘Charlie’ Channel could
also have been recorded at the Dallas Civil Defense HQ at the Fairground, or by
the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) remote radio base stations at the
White House, Andrews AFB, SAC Command Post at Offet AFB or the Collins Radio
“Liberty” relay station, where the frequencies to be used were determined and
monitored.

Without a tape of these broadcasts, we do have the reports
and testimony of a number of witnesses who heard what was said, as Air Force
One pilot Swindel (in “The Flying White
House”) heard Kellerman’s sudden broadcast “We’re hit” and “…Cover
Volunteer!,” and the resulting chaos that clued him that something significant
had happened in the motorcade.

The Charlie Channel tapes, if they exist, could contain
some extremely important information, and an attempt should be made to locate
and release them to the public. (19)

MERRIMAN SMITH - UPI

After Kellerman’s “we’re hit” broadcast over “Charlie” channel
while shots were still being fired, the second most significant radio
communication was made by Merriman Smith, the UPI White House correspondent in
the press pool car.

Smith clearly heard three shots, immediately picked up the
radio telephone from the dashboard of the press pool car, dialed the UPI Dallas
office and yelled, “Bulletin! Preceed! Three shots fired at President Kennedy
as he rode in a motorcade through downtown Dallas.”
According to other reporters in the car, Smith then broke the radiophone so it
could not be operated, preventing them from filing similar reports.

Wilborn Hampton, the youngest United Press International
(UPI) reporter at the Dallas
bureau, took the call from Merriman Smith in the motorcade with first word of
the president's shooting. Hampton
later reported what it was like at Dallas UPI wire service:

(20)

“It had been very hectic in the
office for the previous two days. President John F. Kennedy was making a highly
publicized trip to Texas, going
to five cities and making a major speech in Dallas.
Everybody in the Dallas office had
been busy on the story. Everybody, that is, except me. Since I was the most
inexperienced reporter on the staff, I did not have a lot to do with covering
Kennedy’s trip. As a result, I had felt like a fifth wheel around the office
since the President had arrived in Texas.
The only part I had played so far in covering the President’s visit was to take
some dictation over the telephone the previous day from Merriman Smith, who was
UPI’s chief White House reporter. But that was about to change in the next
couple of minutes. In fact, my whole life was about to change. So, there I was,
standing alone by the news desk, while there was a lull in the office.
President Kennedy has arrived at Love Field, the Dallas
airport, on a five-minute flight from Fort Worth,
and he was at that moment driving through downtown Dallas
in a motorcade on his way to the Trade Mart, where he was to make his speech.”

Hampton: “There had been a flurry
of activity in the office with the President’s takeoff from Fort
Worth, where he had spent the previous night, and his
arrival in Dallas. Although Dallas
was considered hostile political territory to Kennedy, a large crowd turned out
to greet him at Love Field. Jackie Kennedy was given a bouquet of roses and
both the President and First Lady went over to shake hands with some of the
people at the airport. Merriman Smith, who was known by everyone who knew him
as Smitty, had even called in from the telephone in the press car to dictate a
paragraph about how surprisingly large the crowds were. But the office was
quiet now, everyone relaxing for a few moments until the President arrived at
the Trade Mart, and the frenzy of covering an American President would resume. So
I was alone as I stood by the news desk that day. I was wondering whether I
should offer to get sandwiches for the rest of the office from the diner across
the street.”

“Suddenly the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and answered, ‘U.P.I.’”

“I immediately recognized Smitty’s voice from the day before. But this time
Smitty was shouting.”

Within a minute, Hampton would dictate what Smith told him
to another editor who punched it into the UPI teletype machine, pushing a
special bulletin button that would sound a bell alarm to prepare news desks
around the world for a special bulletin, and then began to type the report
which went out to all the UPI teletype machines in the world, including the
ones aboard AF1, the cabinet plane and in the Situation Room at the White
House.

[UPI’s Bob Chockrum notes that, “Ten bells are for a news
flash, five for a bulletin, four for urgent and three for advisory.”]

David Lifton: “The
first transmission was the result of Merriman Smith excitedly talking to
(Wilborn Hampton) at the UPI Dallas office, which means it went from his lips
to UPI's Wilborn Hampton, who took the call; then to staff editor Don Smith,
who actually wrote the copy (along with Hampton); and then it was handed to
teletype operator Jim Tolbert, who actually punched out the words onto
perforated paper, and fed the punched paper-tape into the teletype machine,
pressing ‘send’ at 12:34 PM CST.” (21)

[NOTE: "1234 PCS"
means "12:34 Central Standard
time. The initials on the typed line specifying the time of transmission are
those of the teletype operator – Jim Tolbert.]

After Smith filed his first emergency bulletin from the
Press Pool Car radiophone, he kept the phone from the AP pool reporter in the
back seat, but AP photographer James Altgens, who took a photo of the
President’s car in front of the TSBD, immediately ran into the TSBD, was
directed to a telephone (possibly by Lee H. Oswald) and called his office. The
AP wire report went out a few minutes after the UPI report.

The White House Communications Agency (WHCA) car is
usually the last one in the motorcade, and included Arthur Bales, the chief
WHCA advance man in Dallas and Ira Gearheart the “bagman” with the strategic
communication and nuclear codes. Earlier Bales had lunch with the top Secret
Service and advance men at the Dallas Sheraton to go over the details of the
motorcade, and the Sheraton was where the WHCA base station – the “Dallas White
House” was located.

In his After Action report Bales wrote: “Following is
approximately the sequence of events, as recalled by the undersigned, in Dallas,
Texas, 22 November 1963 ...The motorcade departed for the trip
through downtown Dallas and
to the Trade Mart. In the WHCA Communications Car were: A telco driver; the
undersigned WHCA Advance Officer; the WHCA Courier, Mr. Gearheart; and the
Telco special representative (Shadow) Mr. Herb Smith.” (22)

[BK Notes: From an obituary we learn that Herb Smith was a
senior executive at the Dallas
telephone company, a necessary collaborator for Bales.]

Bales: ‘We were approximately six cars and two (Press and Staff)
buses behind the President. The motorcade had just passed the last buildings on
the route before entering the freeway to the Trade Mart. The WHCA
Communications Car was around two corners from and not in sight of the
President's car. Three explosions were heard, and I thought that they were
backfires from vehicles up ahead. Herb Smith remarked that firecrackers
were in appropriate for the occasion. Then the USSS Agent riding with the
President announced on the FM ‘Charlie’ radio, ‘Lawson, he's hit’. The
motorcade came to an abrupt halt with one bus and the WHCA car still around two
corners from the President. Realizing that emergency communications facilities
may be required on the spot, I instructed the driver to get Mr. Gearhart
immediately to the vicinity of the President and to keep him there regardless
of my own location. I, with the Telco representative, Mr. Smith, then started
running toward the scene of the shooting. As we rounded the first corner the
motorcade suddenly raced away. I commandeered a police car and instructed
the driver to take us immediately to the ParklandHospital. We arrived short minutes
after the President.”

When Bales got to the hospital, he immediately began to
establish secure phone communications with Washington and the WHCA base at the Dallas
Sheraton, seizing a wall of public telephones, except for one, the one which
Merriman Smith was relaying his second report to UPI.

Bales: “ParklandHospital:
The very limited telephone facilities at the hospital were tied up by the
members of the Press Pool. I immediately seized all but one line (leaving
Merriman Smith on the one most remote from the Emergency Rooms) and established
direct circuits to the Signal Board in Washington;
the Dallas White House; and to the Signal board via the Dallas and Fort Worth
White House Boards. I assigned police officers to guard these phones and
instructed the individual Signal Operators in Washington
who were on these circuits to handle no other calls, but to guard these lines
exclusively.”

In an unofficial history of UPI it is noted: “The press car
followed the limousine as it raced to ParklandHospital. As (Merriman) Smith ran
up to the limousine parked at the emergency entrance, he saw Kennedy face down
on the back seat, with Jacqueline Kennedy cradling her arms around the
president's head. Smith saw a secret service agent he knew and asked him about
Kennedy. The agent, Clint Hill, responded: ‘He's dead.’ Smith went inside,
found a phone and reached (UPI editor in New York)
Fallon, who dictated the flash: ‘Kennedy seriously wounded, perhaps seriously,
perhaps fatally by assassins bullet.’”

Since he jumped out of the communications car at the tail
end of the stalled motorcade and ran ahead to DealeyPlaza, Bales then hijacked a police
car to get to ParklandHospital,
where he immediately established secure communications over pay phones and
caught up with Ira Gearheart, the “Bagman.” At Parkland,
Gearheart was recognized by a Secret Service Agent and stationed in the hall
outside the small room where LBJ and his wife were being kept.

Besides emergency numbers and communication codes to talk to
other national leaders, the special attaché case Gearheart carried contained
the nuclear codes that could send US nuclear missiles and bombs to their destinations.
As Manchester described it, these
codes were accompanied by some text cards that allowed the president to quickly
determine what the results of his decisions would be.

Manchester: “The
rest contained pages of close text enlivened by gaudy color cartoons. They
looked like comic books — horror comics, really, because they had been
carefully designed so that any one of Kennedy’s three military aides could
quickly tell him how many million casualties would result from Retaliation
Able, Retaliation Baker, Retaliation Charlie, etc. Taz Shepard had prepared these doomsday books. No one liked to
think about them, much less talk about them, and on trips the man with the
football was treated as a pariah. He needed Art Bales company. His only job was
to stick around, log the satchel, and remember that vital combination in case
the duty aide forgot it. Yet both he and his ghastly burden were necessary. At
the outset of the nuclear age Harry Truman would have had four hours to think
things through if Soviet bombers had appeared over Canada
in force. In the Kennedy administration that time had been cut to fifteen minutes,
and it was shrinking.”

Taz Shepard, the President’s naval attaché, set up the
Situation Room in the White House after the Bay of Pigs,
prepared the doomsday code books, and was in the Situation Room at “Crown” at
the time of the assassination and is mentioned prominently on the Air Force One
radio tapes.

The Doomsday bag that he helped prepare, is a special “Halliburton”
case which was originally designed and made for the founder of the Halliburton
oil company and was used to hold the black box “football” carried by the
“bagman.” (23) Ira Gearheart - the “Bagman,” was stationed just outside the Parkland
hospital room where LBJ was being kept by the Secret Service.

At some point, after it was determined that the President
was dead, it was decided to take LBJ to Love Field and put him aboard Air Force
One. Although some of the Kennedy aides thought Johnson would fly back to WashingtonDC aboard the same plane he flew in on, Air
Force One was chosen, they said, because it had better communications
equipment. (24)

When LBJ was rushed out secretly, before the death of the
President was officially announced, Gearheart the “Bagman” was momentarily left
behind, and rushing to catch up he had to sit on the lap of a Dallas
policeman for the ride to Love Field. After they had left the hospital,
Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff announced that the President had
died.

The official UPI history reads: “When White House deputy
press secretary Malcolm Kilduff gave official word at the hospital that Kennedy
was dead, Hampton, Joe Carter and Preston McGraw set up a three-man relay
between a pay phone and the news conference - one at the conference, one running
between and a third dictating to the bureau. That was backed up by Virginia
Payette on a second phone and Smith, who had found a third line. Smith then
went back to Air Force One, and witnessed the swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson as
president. Smith's account of the assassination won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for
national reporting.”

FIRST CALLS FROM AF1
NOT RECORDED

Since JFK ordered the WHCA to tape record the radio communications from Air
Force One only while it airborne, they apparently didn’t record the
communications made before takeoff, or at least won’t admit to it.

But we do know that the first thing LBJ did as President
was to make at least three phone calls from the special land lines the WHCA had
set up at Love Field.

One was to the office of North Texas Judge Sarah Hughes,
who LBJ had arranged to be appointed to the federal bench and was still waiting
for their arrival at the Dallas Trade Mart. LBJ personally called and instructed
her office to get in touch with her and have her go immediately to Air Force
One to administer the oath of office. (25)

LBJ made another phone call to his personal tax lawyer J.
Waddy Bullion and a third call was made to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy,
ostensibly to get the exact wording of the oath of office, but more likely just
to let Bobby know that he was now President. (26)

J. W. BULLION and HALLIBURTON

The call to Bullion was the most bizarre, and possibly
significant. Whether LBJ made the call to Bullion from ParklandHospital or Air Force One is not
clear, but it was undoubtedly made by a land-line telephone before the swearing
in ceremony while the plane was still on the ground, and therefore not recorded
for posterity.

[Thanks to Dallas
researcher Robert Howard we know] Bullion’s son wrote a book, “In the Boat” (i.e. with LBJ) (27) that
claims that LBJ’s call did not get through to his father, but Russ Baker talked
with one of Bullion’s law partners, who was privy to the conversation.

Baker reported that: “Pat Holloway, former attorney to
both Poppy Bush and Jack Crichton, recounted to me an incident involving LBJ
that had greatly disturbed him. This was around 1
P.M. on November 22, 1963,
just as Kennedy was being pronounced dead. Holloway was heading home from the
office and was passing through the reception area. The switchboard operator
excitedly noted that she was patching the vice president through from Parkland
hospital to Holloway’s boss, firm senior partner Waddy Bullion, who was LBJ’s
personal tax lawyer. The operator invited Holloway to listen in. LBJ was
talking ‘not about conspiracy or about the tragedy,’ Hollway recalled. ‘I heard
him say: ‘Oh, I gotta get rid of my godamn Halliburton stock.’ Lyndon Johnson
was talking about the consequences of his political problems with his
Halliburton stock at a time when the president had been officially declared
dead. And that pissed me off….I really made me furious.’”

Bullion’s book, “In
the Boat” also includes “accounts of the family's relationship with Johnson
as well as a in depth analysis of the hunting trips that both John and Robert
Kennedy made to the LBJ ranch, as well as a very detailed analysis of the
Johnson Trust which was formed to divest the family of assets which would be a
conflict of interest while holding the office of President.” Bullion claimed
not to have billed LBJ for any of the legal work he did, so as not to be
indebted to him.

J. Waddy Bullion’s official bio notes he “was born and
raised in Eden (Texas), taught at Eden High School, completed the University of
Texas Law School in three years, majoring in tax law, and made the highest
grades in the history of the school. After graduation he served as Special
Attorney in the Office of Chief Counsel of the Bureau of IRS
until World War II. He served as a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve and during
the last three years of the war, was Assistant to the Administrative Aide to
the Commander-in-chief of the United States.”

In “A Money Tree Grows
in Texas” Jas. Walker Davis notes that “A $1,000 investment in Halliburton
Company in 1948 when the company was initially available to the public would be
worth as of the year-end 1968, $19,700.00. This included the following stock
distributions: 2 for 1 in 1953, 5 for 4, 1955; 2 for 1, 1964, 2 for 1,
1969.”

The Corporate office of Halliburton – 3211 SouthlandCenter, Dallas,
Texas – is in the same building in which
the Dallas Sheraton - WHCA switchboard was located.

The SouthlandCenter
is also the building where anti-Castro Cuban Antonio Veciana said he met his
case officer “Maurice Bishop” and Lee Harvey Oswald in the late summer of 1963.

Among the corporate officers of Halliburton were R. O. Brown and G. R. Brown
(of Brown & Root) and J.B. Connally, a Halliburton director and governor of
Texas who was wounded in the shooting.

As previously noted, the Doomsday bag with special
communications and the nuclear attack codes is carried in a special
“Halliburton” case, originally designed for the founder of the company.

JACK CRICHTON AND SILVER DOLLAR

It is also significant that J. W. Bullion was the personal
tax attorney for not only the new President but Jack Crichton was also an
important client.

Jack Alston Crichton was one of the oil men who knew Lee
Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, through their mutual friend George
DeMohrenschildet, and it was Crichton who arranged for Illya Mamantov to assist
authorities in interpreting Marina Oswald in the immediate aftermath of the
assassination.

Crichton was also an officer of the local U.S. Army Reserve
Intelligence Unit, whose commander, Lt. Col. George Whitmeyer was an
unauthorized passenger in the Pilot Car, a half mile ahead of the motorcade,
which was driven by Deputy Police Chief Lumpkin, another U.S. Army Reserve
Intelligence officer. (30)

It should be noted that this car stopped briefly at the
corner of Houston and Elm and
informed one of the police officers on traffic duty, directly under the alleged
assassin’s window, that the motorcade was forthcoming, thus informing the Sixth
Floor Sniper as well as the traffic cops posted there. Those in the Pilot Car
were also tuned in to the special WHCA “Charlie Channel” radio, which they used
it to keep abreast of the location of the motorcade.

Peter Dale Scott points out that Jack Crichton was
affiliated with the Dallas Civil Defense Post, (that Russ Baker also writes
about) and Scott relates the possible significance of another strange and
possibly wayward telephone call that was made at 12:25
PM, five minutes before the assassination. At that time, the U.S.
Fourth Army Headquarters at Fort Sam Houston in San
Antonio, Texas received a telephone
call over the regular, unsecured phone line: “This is Silver Dollar calling to
test communications. I read you loud and clear. How do you read me?” (31)

“Silver Dollar” was the code name for the National Emergency
Airborne command and control “Doomsday” plane – NEACAP. As Scott correctly surmises,
“The fact that NEACAP was airborne and making test calls might seem irrelevant
to events on the ground in Dallas,
until we learn that Crichton’s Dallas Civil Defense Post was part of its
network. Those with resource to such secure networks are in a position to
manipulate our country’s history, when necessary by provocation-deception
plots.”

“Silver Dollar,” the NEACAP “Doomsday” plane, was one of
several command and control planes operated by the Strategic Air Command as
part of a fleet that also included “Speckled Trout,” a plane often used by
General Curtis LeMay, Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

At 1:20 PM, while
LBJ was still at Parkland, according to the special
Andrews AFB Log (that was ordered destroyed), an order was issued for a plane
to pick up Gen. LeMay in Toronto, Canada.
At 1:46 PM, twenty six minutes
later, an Air Force SAM C-140 departed
Andrews to pick up LeMay in Toronto,
Canada, at the same time
the Cabinet plane over the Pacific turned around to return to Hawaii.

At 1:50 PM, LeMay
changed his point of pickup from Toronto
to Wiarton, Canada.

The first news story naming Oswald was an AP report issued
at 2:35 PM CST, while 26000 (Air
Force One) was still on the ground in Dallas.

At the end of LBJ Tape Cassette #1, Air Force One has yet to
depart Dallas, and the first patch
on Reel 1 Side 2 begins with Jerry (Behn), head of the White House detail of
the Secret Service in Washington,
being informed that they are still waiting for LBJ to be sworn in.

LBJ was officially sworn in as the new president aboard Air
Force One at 2:38 PM CST.

Air Fore One finally departed Dallas
at 2:47 PM CST (3:47 EST) for Andrews, and was in the air at the same time
as the Cabinet Plane and LeMay’s plane, and they are all
using the same four radio frequencies that can be heard on the Air Force One
radio transmission tapes.

THE CABINET PLANE
- SAM 86972

Before reviewing the existing, Air Force One tapes as edited,
it should be noted that three journalists who did not hear the tapes, were
permitted by the LBJ White House to read a transcript of the unedited tapes,
because they quote things that are not only the existing tapes. William
Manchester, T. H. White and former Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger
all had access to a transcript of the unedited tapes, and reporter Jim Bishop
talked with those who had heard the broadcasts in real time or heard the
unedited recordings, and quote from it.

At the time of the assassination Salinger and six members of
the President’s Cabinet were aboard the Boeing 707 known to radio operators as SAM
86972 (aka 972), 35,000 feet above the Pacific, nine hundred miles west of
Hawaii, when they first learned of the assassination from the UPI wire service
report.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of the Treasury
Douglas Dillon, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall, Secretary of Commerce
Luther Hodges, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, Secretary of Labor
Willard Wirtz and Press Secretary Pierre Salinger were among those aboard the specially
modified Boeing 707-120 (VC-137B) commercial airliner, with different interior
furnishings and electronic equipment. The primary mission of SAM
86972 was “to provide first class, worldwide transportation for the
Vice-President, Cabinet members and international dignitaries.” (32)

Among the communications equipment aboard SAM
86972 were standard newsroom UPA and AP wire service machines.

Press Secretary Pierre Salinger had just sat down with a
book when the wire service machine bell rang five times and then began to
clatter text on paper.

Robert Manning (33), the assistant Secretary of State for
Public Affairs, a former newsman, knew that the bells meant breaking news, so
he went over and began reading the jumbled text as it came over the wire,
tapped out by an automatic typewriter, as it had been sent moments earlier by
the Dallas UPI office:

Manning immediately took the disjointed report to Dean Rusk,
the senior cabinet member on board in the state room, and Rusk read it, and
told Manning to get Salinger.

In his book “With
Kennedy” Pierre Salinger wrote: “By 7 A.M., our sleek blue and white
presidential Boeing 707 jet was lifting off Hickam Field, headed for Wake
Island and Tokyo. I was immersed in my reading sometime later when I felt a tap
on my shoulder and looked up. It was Robert Manning, ‘The Secretary wants to
see you up forward,’ he said. Up forward was the private cabin reserved for the
President, but used on this trip by the Secretary of State as the senior
officer aboard.” (34)

“I found the Secretary, grave-faced, holding a yellow piece
of paper in his hand. I recognized it instantly as coming from the plane’s
teletype machine. Because this plane was used a great deal by the President, it
carried sophisticated communications equipment not usually carried on
commercial airliners. One of these extra communications items was a newspaper
teletype. The other members of the Cabinet on the trip were already in the
cabin. As we waited for Myer Feldman of the White House staff and Walter
Heller, the chairman of the President’s Council on Economic Advisor’s, I looked
over Secretary Rusk’s shoulder, the words on the page were badly scrambled –
but what I managed to read was unbelievable.”

“I kept reading it over and over again as Feldman and Heller
pushed their way into the cabin. The words stayed on the paper. They would not
go away. Secretary Rusk read us the last brief bulletin.”

“‘My God!’ gasped Orville Freeman…..Then there was an
interminable silence as each man became lost in his private sorrow.”

“‘We’ve got to turn back right now,’” I said to Secretary
Rusk.”

“That’s right, but we have to verify this somehow. Get us in
communication with the White House and see if you can get Admiral Felt at
CINCPAC…”

“I pushed my way through the forward door of the cabin into
the communications section of the plane. ‘Get the White House and Admiral
Felt,’ I ordered the communicators, Sergeants Walter C. Baughman and Darrell
Skinner. In less than a minute, from almost 6000 miles away, I was talking to
the White House Situation Room, the operating nerve center of the nation.”

In the basement of the White House, the Situation Room was
set up in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s first crisis, the Bay
of Pigs, in early 1961. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his
book "A Thousand Day," notes
that JFK thought that one reason the Bay of Pigs failed
was because he received secondhand updates on the situation. (35)

Michael Bohn, who once worked in the White Situation Room
and wrote it’s history in his book “Nerve
Center” (2003) reported that, “Kennedy
and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wanted a place where
they could get the same real-time info the Pentagon and the CIA got,
and where the chief executive and his closest advisers could weigh this data in
confidence and come to their own conclusions. In retrospect, lack of timely
updates may have played a minor role in the Bay of Pigs
fiasco. But in the weeks between the Bay of Pigs and May
15, Kennedy's naval aide Tazewell Shepard enlisted a bunch of Seabees
and turned part of the West Wing basement ‘into a facility that some political
scientists say changed the fundamental nature of the presidency.’" (36)

As the Air Force One radio transmission recordings reveal,
Salinger was put through to “Crown” the code name for the White House, and when
he asked for the latest situation on the President, the operator asked if he
wanted the Situation Room.

The Navy officer in the White House Situation Room, Oliver
Hallett, within the hour, would also learn from the wire service reports that
the accused assassin was former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who Hallett had known
from his stint as a Navy attaché at the US Embassy in Moscow.
Hallett was in Snyder’s office when Oswald turned his passport over to the
senior embassy officer, who kept Oswald’s passport in his desk drawer until
Oswald decided to return home. His wife was Snyder’s secretary. (37)

As Max Holland points out, Hallett is one of the few members
of the small group of people who had met both President Kennedy and his
(alleged) assassin. (38)

When Salinger was writing his book he requested and the
White House Communications Agency gave him a copy of a transcript of the Air
Force One radio communications that included his conversations with the White
House Situation Room. Salinger said that he gave his copy of the transcript to
the JFK Library in Boston, but when
Vincent Salandria requested this document, it could not be located. (39)

Salinger wrote: “The radio operator called me forward almost
immediately to take a call from the Situation Room: ‘AP bulletin is just coming
in. President hit in the head. That just came in.’”

“‘Understand. President hit in the head,’ I replied, heading
back to Secretary Rusk’s cabin. We were then 1200 miles from Wake
Island and 800 miles from Hawaii.
Secretary Rusk had swiftly taken control of the situation. If the President
lived, he felt it was essential that certain members of the party on the plane
go immediately to Dallas, to his
side. Others should get back to Washington
as soon as possible. The Secretary decided that he, Bob Manning, and I should
go to Dallas, and that the others
on the plane should go back to the Capital….Communications were established
with Admiral Harry D. Felt.”

Admiral Harry D. Felt, the commander of the Pacific Command
– CINPAC, as we later learned, was the only theater commander to raise the
military alert status as a result of the assassination, increasing it from
Defcon 5 to Defcon 4, a state of increased readiness over an area that included
all the US
forces in the Pacific, including Vietnam.

Salinger: “The plane roared through the early morning skies.
We were informed that a jet had been set up for a trip to Dallas,
if necessary. I got two more messages. The first was from ‘Stranger.’ He said
our plane was to turn around and go back to Washington.”

Salinger: “My report of these messages seriously troubled
Secretary Rusk. He wanted to know who Stranger was. Aboard every presidential
jet there is usually a White House codebook. We searched for it for about five
minutes, but there was none aboard this plane.”

“’We have to know who
Stranger is,’” Secretary Rusk said. ‘We don’t know what is happening in Dallas. Who is the government now?’”

“And certainly this was a question running through
everybody’s mind. We had no further word on President Kennedy. Was his shooting
an isolated event or part of a national or international conspiracy? Certainly,
if the latter were true, our own plane was not immune to attack because any
foreign power which had planned the shooting of the President would certainly
not be unaware of the fact that six of his ten Cabinet members were in an
airplane high over the Pacific.”

Salinger says, and as the tapes confirm, “The decision was
made that I was to break the code and find out the identity of Stranger.”

Salinger: “Stranger was Major Harold R. Patterson, a
high-ranking officer in the White House Communications Agency. He was, at the
time of his transmission to our plane, in WashingtonD.C. I knew Paterson
well. He was one of the most trusted members of the White House staff and he
would not have sent us the message without very clear instructions….” (40)

“The messages kept coming off the wire service machine and
finally one started grinding out the story of Lee Harvey Oswald and his
previous life in Russia
and his membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This went against all
the preconceived theories we had established.” (41)

“‘If this is true,’ Secretary Rusk said, ‘this is going to have
repercussions around the world for years to come.’ His words were prophetic
because even today, only in the United States
is the report of the Warren Commission, fixing the sole responsibility on
Oswald, widely believed…”

“It took us only eight hours and thirty-one minutes to make
the non-stop flight from Honolulu
to Andrews Air Force Base. We arrived there at 12:31
A.M., Washington
time, and stepped out of the plane into a barrage of lights from television
cameras…”

In an article posted on the
internet, “The Tokyo Flight - Coincidence or Conspiracy?”

Ronald L. Ecker considers the idea that if the assassination
was a high level coup, the presence of the cabinet on the plane over the
Pacific was possibly part of the plot. He reviewed these same facts and
concluded, “And that was the extent of the missing code book crisis. The code
book should not have been missing, but its absence, which proved to be of no
real consequence, does not by itself mean something sinister. Still, Rusk's
concern over Stranger illustrates the fact that conspirators would certainly
have been able to take advantage of there being no code book on board under a
worst-case scenario.” (42)

Just as Col. Fletcher Prouty suspects he was sent to
Antartica to get him out of the way at the time of the assassination, there is
the suggestion that it wasn’t a coincidence that most of the cabinet were on a
plane on the other side of the world, and additional evidence of chicanery is
the fact that the code book was missing.

While one such incident may be happenstance, and two might
be a coincidence, three such incidences stretches credulity, and John Judge
presents just such a case.

John Judge, the director of COPA – the Coalition on
Political Assassinations, attended the University
of Dayton, in Dayton,
Ohio, also the home of Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base, where today the Air Force One from November 22, 1963 is on display at the air museum.

While there in the 1970s, Judge was a guest at the
Wright-Pat Officers Club, where he talked with an officer who said he was a
Strategic Air Command pilot of a nuclear armed B-52 during the Cuban Missile
Crisis and when President Kennedy was killed. This pilot told Judge that he
came to within 30 seconds of reaching the Fail Safe point during the Cuban
Missile Crisis. (43)

On the day JFK was assassinated, the SAC pilots said they
were in the air on their regular shift as part of a fleet of armed bombers in
the air on a 24 hour basis. When they learned, over civilian commercial radio,
that the President had been shot, they thought they would receive new orders.
In preparation for that they opened the plane’s safe to get the code books that
are needed to translate and confirm any orders, and the code books were
missing. While they didn’t get any orders while airborne, when they returned to
their base in Nebraska, they
compared notes with other pilots, and they too said their code books were
missing.

Just like Air Force One, the Cabinet Plane (86972) and Gen.
LeMay’s plane, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) nuclear bomber radio
communications utilized Collins Radio sideband equipment. Gen. LeMay was
himself an amateur ham radio buff, and was personal friends with Art Collins,
the president of the company, whose hometown of Cedar
Rapids, Iowa was also home to “Liberty”
station, where radio communications frequencies were set, coordinated and
relayed. (44)

As Manchester
wrote, aboard Air Force One “Aft of the cockpit Signalman John Trimble was too
busy to brood. He had three phone patches going to the communications shack,
and he was using Hanson's UHF and VHF sets, yet it wasn't enough. Every
official in Washington it seemed, wanted to talk to Air Force One...Several
conversations were trivial....Lem Johns was forwarding instructions to the
White House Communications Agency, and Bill Moyers was talking to Walter
Jenkins and Mac Bundy. (Ted Clifon talked to Bundy,
too, asking again whether an international plot was emerging. It was
not a discreet inquiry. Trimble's patches were not secure. They could be
bugged. Bundy replied crisply that the Pentagon was taking its own steps.) But
the bulk of the verbal traffic was about President Kennedy...” (45)

William Manchester, personally selected by Jackie Kennedy to
write the definitive story of the assassination, wrote in The Death of the President. “…On April
21, 1964, this writer learned that the Love-to-Andrews tape still
existed. Since security was not involved, it was first thought that a
complete transcript of it would serve as a useful appendix to this book.
Presidential consent was withheld, however. On May 5, 1965, the author was permitted to read an
edited transcript at the White House. Doubtless the tape will be
available to future historians.”

Theodore. H. White, who first described Jackie Kennedy’s
“Camelot,” wrote in The Making of a
President 1964, "There is a tape recording in the archives of the
government which best recaptures the sound of the hours as it waited for
leadership. It is a recording of all the conversations in the air, monitored by
the Signal Corps Midwestern center ‘Liberty,’ between Air Force One in Dallas,
the Cabinet plane over the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs’ Communications Center
in Washington….On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy,
learned the identity of Oswald and his arrest; and the President’s mind turned
to the duties of consoling the stricken and guiding the quick."

According to the analysis of E. Martin Schotz and Vincent
Salandria (in History Will Not Absolve Us,
1996), "And yet the White House had informed President Johnson and the
other occupants of Air Force One, all of them witnesses to the hail of bullets
which had poured down on Dealey Plaza, that as of the afternoon of the
assassination there was to be no conspiracy and that Oswald was to be the lone
assassin. If White’s report were correct this would mean that federal officials
in Washington were marrying the
government to the cover-up of Oswald as the lone assassin virtually
instantaneously. This could have occurred only if those federal authorities had
had foreknowledge that the evidence would implicate Oswald and that he would
have ‘no confederates.’ An innocent government could not have reacted in such a
fashion internally." (47)

NOTES for: Prequel to a Forensic Analysis

1) Forensic - fo·ren·sic adj.
1. Relating to, used in, or appropriate for courts of law or for public discussion or argumentation. 2. Of,
relating to, or used in debate or argument; rhetorical. 3. Relating to the
use of science or technology in the investigation and establishment
of facts or evidence in a court of law: a forensic laboratory.

….When consulted by the Vice President, O'Donnell advised
him to go to the airfield immediately and return to Washington.245 It was
decided that the Vice President should return on the Presidential plane rather
than on the Vice-Presidential plane because it had better communication
equipment. 246…

32)SAM
86972. Used by Vice President, Cabinet and senior military officers. According
to official descriptions, “The interior of SAM
86972 was divided into three sections: Forward (crew area), center (stateroom)
and aft (passenger). The forward section had a communications center, a galley,
lavatory and 13-seat compartment with one table and two overhead bunks. The
center section was designed for VIP, with
conference tables, swivel chairs, projection screen, two convertible sofa-bunks
and a lavatory. The aft section was a combination staff and passenger areas,
and contained a Xerox machine, reclining seats, overhead bunks, tables, galley
two lavatories. The VC-137B was usually operated by an augmented crew of about
twenty, including three pilots (two were qualified aircraft commanders), two
navigators, two flight engineers, one crew chief, two communication systems
operators, six flight attendants and four security guards.”

33)Manning, Robert.
Sec. State for Public Affairs. From The
Kennedy Presidency An Oral History of The (page 450)Eraby Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, an updated
edition of “Let Us Begin Anew: An Oral
History of the Kennedy Presidency” by the same authors.

37)Holland,
Max “The Kennedy Assassination Tapes” (Alfred Knopf, NY, 2004, p.18 notes) on
Hallett. While Holland didn’t
identify the “Liberty” station, he
did point out that Hallett knew Oswald from the US Embassy in Moscow.

1) Forensic - fo·ren·sic adj.
1. Relating to, used in, or appropriate for courts of law or for public discussion or argumentation. 2. Of,
relating to, or used in debate or argument; rhetorical. 3. Relating to the
use of science or technology in the investigation and establishment
of facts or evidence in a court of law: a forensic laboratory.

….When consulted by the Vice President, O'Donnell advised
him to go to the airfield immediately and return to Washington.245 It was
decided that the Vice President should return on the Presidential plane rather
than on the Vice-Presidential plane because it had better communication
equipment. 246…

32)SAM
86972. Used by Vice President, Cabinet and senior military officers. According
to official descriptions, “The interior of SAM
86972 was divided into three sections: Forward (crew area), center (stateroom)
and aft (passenger). The forward section had a communications center, a galley,
lavatory and 13-seat compartment with one table and two overhead bunks. The
center section was designed for VIP, with
conference tables, swivel chairs, projection screen, two convertible sofa-bunks
and a lavatory. The aft section was a combination staff and passenger areas,
and contained a Xerox machine, reclining seats, overhead bunks, tables, galley
two lavatories. The VC-137B was usually operated by an augmented crew of about
twenty, including three pilots (two were qualified aircraft commanders), two
navigators, two flight engineers, one crew chief, two communication systems
operators, six flight attendants and four security guards.”

33)Manning, Robert.
Sec. State for Public Affairs. From The
Kennedy Presidency An Oral History of The (page 450)Eraby Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, an updated
edition of “Let Us Begin Anew: An Oral
History of the Kennedy Presidency” by the same authors.

37)Holland,
Max “The Kennedy Assassination Tapes” (Alfred Knopf, NY, 2004, p.18 notes) on
Hallett. While Holland didn’t
identify the “Liberty” station, he
did point out that Hallett knew Oswald from the US Embassy in Moscow.